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(2009) Human Studies 32 (3).
A “take-home” lesson of philosophy of science and epistemology from the last 50 years concerns the cautionary tales told by (among others) W. V. O. Quine and Thomas Kuhn regarding “progress” with respect to epistemological or scientific inquiry. The caution in both cases involves fundamentally the same point: absent a metric of epistemic goodness that provides determinate indices of improvement upon a prior theory or advancement towards a better one, talk of progress proves empty. Quine’s web of belief and Kuhn’s incommensurable paradigm shifts pose alternatives to their predecessors’ optimistic accounts of belief change (either individual or collective), viz., ones that portray changes of belief as logical/rational alterations of specific theoretical inferences as a consequence of particular experiences. Without reasons for epistemic optimism, e.g., a method for vouchsafing the rational attunement of beliefs to experience, any directional account of knowledge becomes quite...
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/s10746-009-9124-2
Full citation:
Roth, P. A. (2009). Review of Quo vadis? Quine's web, Kuhn's revolutions, and Baert's "way forward",. Human Studies 32 (3), pp. 357-.
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